At 6/23/02 7:47 AM, Christopher Hicks wrote: >Amazingly, it could be worse. I had one admin in the UK a few years ago >that setup their name servers to ignore TTL altogether. The only way to >get them to clear their cache of stale data was for it to reboot and it >didn't reboot except once every six months. We eventually had to tell the >users that were stuck with that nasty name server to point their machines >at our name server. Even though the DNS traffic was going from the UK to >the US and back for these people they claimed their web performance >increased noticably. Scary.
I had one customer who found that her site was resolving to the old IP address more than a week, long after everyone else could see it. We spent hours trying to figure out the problem. Eventually we discovered that unbeknownst to her, her husband had once installed a program called FastNet99: http://www.geocities.com/gcriaco/ What this horrific program does is go through all your bookmarks and so forth, do DNS lookups on each site, and store the resulting IP addresses in the computer's Hosts file. They then stay like that forever unless you run the FastNet99 program again to update the entries, which of course she didn't know about (in fact, the program itself had been deleted from the computer, leaving behind the Hosts file, after the husband tried it!). So in effect, it makes all the domains in your bookmarks stay in the cache forever. As I said, horrific. If you ever get a customer like this, ask them to look at their Hosts file (in the Windows directory) and see if the domain name in question is listed. ------------------------------------ Robert L Mathews, Tiger Technologies
